The answer pleased mother since it seemed to insure faithful service.
Thus it was that Jonathan Nickerson came to work on the Stark farm.
My father, Captain David Stark, had been a soldier in the Civil War. He had enlisted when only sixteen years of age and, by military aptitude and bravery, had won a captain’s commission, before he was twenty-one.
Over the mantel of our front room, secluded from light and flies except when we had company, hung a sword which had been presented to him, so its inscription read, by his admiring officers and men.
He had married my mother some years younger than he, quite late in life, and I was their only child. He had died before I remembered much about him.
One day Jot noticed the sword and read its inscription. He removed his hat reverently and said: “I would like to be a brave soldier like him. My mother’s only brother, Lieutenant Jedediah Hoskins, was killed while leading a charge, just before the surrender at Appomattox. She was but a little child when that occurred, but she had his back pay and other property to help us, and often called me Jed’s Boy, hoping that I would be like him.”
Jonathan, or Jot as we began to call him, was careful and handy; he repaired locks, and even put in running order a disregarded mowing machine that Bill, who didn’t like “new fangled farming,” declared was good for nothing. We soon began to regard him as one of the family, and mother liked him because, as she said, he was both honest and careful and “had not a lazy bone in his body.”
Bill usually read the weekly newspaper in the evening, sometimes commenting aloud on what he read. One evening while reading he looked up exclaiming, “Gosh!”
“What is it, Bill,” I asked, “anybody dead?”
“Matter! The Germans are marching on Paris”, he answered, “and there has been the all-firedest fightin’ you ever heard tell of.” Then Bill read aloud the news of the first fighting in the Great World War.